This week was another challenge, mainly on the weekend. But my protags have a moment for which they are getting royally harassed. Apparently, “The Light at the End of the Tunnel” described in Broken Skies and Warped kindles romantic feelings in a darkened observation lounge.
The so-called “Light” is the collection of radiation and light at the leading edge of a warp field in the Compact Universe. For Tomle Modesto, our erstwhile cocky pilot, it’s a welcome break from wormhole travel, which is almost instantaneous but often makes one sick. In another novella I just put to bed, one character takes an alien pill for wormhole sickness and has a mild orgasm going through said wormhole. Believe it or not, that story will be coming out before Flight Blade.
This week, I spent writing a few scenes that describe the differences between warp drive and wormholes. Lancaster, the droll, highly intelligent dwarf engineer from Warped, explains why the Compact wants warp drive even though it takes forever to get anywhere. We also see the ill effects of wormholes on some humans with Mitsuko holding Tomle’s head over a toilet after an unexpected jump. But there’s more to it than that. Tomle is on the Challenger both as a personal pilot to a major dignitary and to learn how to navigate at warp.
This is evolving into a lower decks story, where the main crew of the commanders do not get all the attention but two junior officers. I could easily have done this with the enlistees, but I haven’t developed the universe enough for that.
Yet.
In the meantime, I finally put The Amortals to bed and started transcribing The Exile, the novella I wrote longhand over the month of August. These stories always hold up better than I expect, and this one will actually be about 2/3 the length of The Amortals. Were I still doing indie pub, I would make it a paperback in its own right. But Flight Blade, like The Amortals, will flirt with the lower end of novel territory.